Zivilisierung, Massenvernichtung und der Staat

Abstract

Is massive violence and destruction a manifestation of ‘modernity’, even its very essence, or rather its total opposite: ‘a breakdown of civilization’? I shall argue a position that transcends this opposition between ‘modernization’ and ‘regression’, between Norbert Elias and Zygmunt Baumann: At the core of the civilizing process another contrary current may manifest itself, allowing extreme violence on a mass scale to be perpetrated towards specific categories of people, while civilized relations and modes of expression are maintained in other sections of society. The concepts of identification, disidentification and compartmentalization should help to describe and explain these ‘dyscivilizing’ processes in their complex relations to processes of civilization.